"Wicked Jack"
or "Wicked John and the Devil"

Overview: The
blacksmith who makes mean-spirited choices when granted three wishes
by St. Peter or an angel is often called Wicked Jack in America, but
Richard Chase preferred to call him John to avoid confusion with the
young folk hero Jack. Often the blacksmith is thoroughly mean (except
for being kind to strangers) but sometimes he has a specific sinful
trait. He has a wife in some versions but not others. He sometimes
makes deals with the devil in order to get more time on earth and to
gain wealth. He tricks the devil, and sometimes the devil's children,
to keep the devil away, but when he dies, he is rejected at the gates
of both
heaven and hell. Many versions have a pourquoi ending,
explaining the origin of swamp gas or jack-o-lanterns when the
blacksmith is doomed to wander the earth forever with a bit of fire.

Chase,
Richard. Wicked John and the Devil. Illus. Joshua Tolford.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1951. Picture book with black-and-white and color illustrations
depicting the red devils outwitted by a blacksmith so mean that he is
denied access to heaven and hell when he dies. "Based on an oral
version I first heard told by Mrs. Jenning L. Yowell of Albemarle
County, Virginia." The endpapers contain a great double-page
scene of John walking between heaven and hell, with fires, a pitchfork
fence in the foreground, and a big group of devils. See AppLit's Chase bibliography for reviews and articles in Walser archive
about 1963 controversy over this book in an East
Greensboro, NY school.

Chase,
Richard. "Wicked John and the Devil." American
Folk Tales and Songs. 1956. Rpt. New York: Dover, 1971. pp. 21-31.
Chase heard the tale from Mrs. Yowell in Charlottesville, VA, in
1945. He notes parallels with
an Irish tale, "The Three Wishes," and other tales all over
Europe, as well as "Jacky-My-Lantern" and "Impty Umpty"
in Uncle Remus, and the one in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and
Men. He had heard of the story about a man too mean for hell
being applied to Hitler. He also mentions the success of dramatizations
by himself and school groups. In a footnote Chase summarizes an
article about jack-o-lanterns starting in Ireland with potatoes and
other vegetables hollowed out for Halloween. The article contained "A
Boy Called Jack Who Would Not Obey His Parents," in which Jack, turned
away from heaven and hell, puts the chunk of coal thrown to him by the
devil into a potato and wanders the earth with a Jack-O-Lantern.

Chase,
Richard. "Wicked John and the Devil." Grandfather Tales.
Boston: Houghton, 1948. pp. 29-39. With one drawing by Berkeley
William, Jr. of a black devil with a cloven hoof and horns standing in
the doorway of Wicked John's blacksmith shop. The Appendix in this
book gives Mrs. Yowell of Charlottesville and her daughter Alois and
Peck Daniel of Bristol, VA as sources. The St. Peter/Patrick part came
from Peck Daniel and Mrs. Yowell called the main character Wicked
Jack. The fire-bush, or Japan quince, is "common to Southern yards."

Chase,
Richard. "Wicked John and the Devil." Reprinted with
other tales about "fooling the devil" in Yolen, Jane, ed. Favorite Folktales from Around the World. New York: Pantheon,
1986, pp. 359-66. Yolen notes that American versions of tale
type 330, The Smith and the Devil, and The Smith and Death, can be
found all over the South. She also observes that "The motif 'Devil
sticking to tree or stool or chair' can be traced as far back as ancient
Greek and Hebrew sources" (Notes, p. 490). Also reprinted in Tudor, Tasha. Favorite Stories. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965, with illustrations by Tasha Tudor.

Chase
tells "Wicked John and the Devil" on an audio cassette recorded
during a class lecture/discussion on types of folklore at Appalachian
State University in 1975. Chase noted that this tale was known to
blacks and there are two versions in Uncle Remus. He said that Indian
children in Michigan, who grow up in an oral tradition, laughed much
harder at this tale than his present audience. In this version of
the tale, St. Peter gives John back 15 cents before making him leave
heaven. His one good deed had been giving 15 cents extra change to
a boy selling a country newspaper, Grit. Chase explained
that he got this part of the tale (which was not in print) from Presbyterian
preachers who did skits and made fun of each other, telling jokes
about getting to heaven first. In Richard Chase Papers 1928-1988, W.
L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Appalachian State University.

Chase
tells "Wicked John and the Devil" on the radio in Davis, James A. The Bard of Beech Mountain. Radio broadcast from Station WBT
(Charlotte, NC) May 30, 1963 as a program in the series Project Sixty.
2 cassettes. 60 min. Archived in North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. Davis,
writer and producer of the program, gives background on Chase and
folktales. Excerpts are played from Chase's visits to schools during a
tour while he lived on Beech Mt. He sings several songs with the
audience, plays the harmonica, discusses the nature and importance of
folklore, and tells "Wicked
John."
He does not include the part aboutchange for Grit or
any explanation for
John's ball of fire being seen on earth at the end.

Photos Below: The Jack Tale Players perform "Wicked John and the Devil,"
Ferrum College, March 1, 2006: St. Peter checks his book
of good and evil deeds. Wicked John the blacksmith shows his
meanness. The devil (director Rex Stephenson, bottom right)
orders his two children to go after Wicked John.

Photos by Suzie Kelly

Stephenson,
R. Rex. "Wicked John and the Devil." The Jack Tales. Schulenburg, TX: I. E. Clark, 1991. Reprint Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing. Story theatre dramatization,
as performed by The
Ferrum Jack Tale Players (performance photos from 2006
above). Wicked John will help only a crippled old beggar man
who turns out to be St. Peter. When granted three wishes, John asks
for his rocking chair, hammer, and fire bush to torment those who
use them. He uses them to trick and chase away the devil's two
impish sons and then the devil himself. After John drops dead,
St. Peter shows him the long, long, long page full of bad deeds in
his book of life. Humorous touches include St. Peter's reading of
the names Johnny Appleseed and John the Baptist while looking for
John, Wicked in the book. After John is turned away at the gates of
heaven and hell, he takes the fire ball the devil gives him and points
out that he can be seen walking the Dismal Swamp between Virginia
and North Carolina, although school teachers often say that it is
just swamp gas out there in the moonlight. (Photo at right from 30th anniversary celebration of Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre, 2009. See an older photo in Jack Tale Players web site.)

"Wicked John and the Devil." Told by Ray Hicks. Transcription in Sobol, Joseph. "’Whistlin’
Towards the Devil’s House’: Poetic Transformations and Natural
Metaphysics in an Appalachian Folktale Performance." Oral Tradition, vol. 21, no. 1 (2006). Downloadable at Oral Tradition web site. Center for Studies in Oral Tradition.
Columbia, MO. With audio recordings made at Ray Hicks's home in 1985.
"This study centers on a performance of one of Hicks’s signature
tales, 'Wicked John and the Devil." Discussing the relationship
between Richard Chase's research and books and the Hicks-Harmon
tradition of oral storytelling, Sobol argues that Chase may have
introduced the tale to the Hicks family while Ray was young.
Fascinating discussion of of how the tale reflects Ray Hicks' personal
philosophy and aesthetic, and his identification with the blacksmith
who is not a simplistically wicked folklore character. Hicks' "poetic
transformation," told without laughter, produces "a tragic elegy" in
contrast to "the typical jocular tale" (p. 19). At the end Hicks says
associates the Brown Mountain Lights with the starting place of John's
return to earth with fire the devil gives him.

"Wicked
John." Told by Orville
Hicks. Carryin' On: Jack Tales for Children of All Ages. Audio cassette. Whitesburg, KY: June Appal Recordings, 1990. In this
version, Jack is condemned for the single sin of cursing. At the end
Jack is sent away from heaven and hell to make a hell of his own, with
nothing about swamp gas or jack-o-lanterns reflecting his wanderings
in the world.

Woolridge,
Connie Nordhielm (adapter). Wicked Jack. Illus. Will Hillenbrand.
New York: Holiday House,1995. Cartoonlike comedy and haunting mystery
combine in this story of mean Jack the blacksmith, who is excluded
from heaven and hell after he outwits the devil. Woolridge includes
a brief note citing Chases and Zora Neale Hurstons versions
of the tale as her sources. The illustrations add many
details of action and character to the narration. See details on AppLit Trivia Page.

"The
Cantankerous Blacksmith." Told by ConnieRegan-Blake,
with music by The
Kandinsky Trio. In Tales of Appalachia: Stories and Chamber
Music. CD. Salem, VA: Flat Five Press and Recording, 2004. When
Regan-Blake tells "The Cantankerous Blacksmith" with music by Mike
Reid, she cites Ray Hicks, Barbara Freeman, and Richard Chase as her influences in this fascinating retelling of "Wicked John" with
great music. She also tells "Big Jack, Little Jack," which Ray Hicks
called "Lucky Jack and Unlucky Jack." The trio (Alan Weinstein,
Elizabeth Bachelder, and Benedict Goodfriend) also plays "Dark Eyes"
(a Russian folk song) and "Gypsy Medley (blending the Russian "Kolinka"
and a Hungarian tune).

"Wicked
John and the Devil." In Smith, Jimmy Neil, ed. Why the Possum's
Tail is Bare and Other Classic Southern Stories. New York: Avon,
1993. "Told from her family tradition by storyteller Jackie Torrence
of Salisbury, NC" (not in the Appalachian mountains but
Torrence learned mountain folktales from Richard Chase's collections
and from mountain storytellers; see note in next entry below). In Torrence's version, Wicked John
lives in the mountains of NC. He has a wife who locks herself in the
closet because he is so mean, and an angel grants him 3 wishes. The
third wish does not involve a bush but enables him to keep his wife
from taking money out of his purse, and the third time the devil comes
for him, he tricks the devil into turning himself into a quarter that
is trapped in John's purse. (The devil's children are not in this
story.) When John dies the neighbors open his purse so the devil
escapes and is still flying around.

"Wicked
John and the Devil" by Jackie Torrence. Best-Loved Stories Told
at the National Storytelling Festival. Jonesborough, TN: National
Storytelling Press and Little Rock: August House, 1991. pp. 51-58. The book has 37 tales, including "The Day the
Cow Ate my Britches" by Ray Hicks,
"Cap o' Rushes" by Ellin Greene, "C-R-A-Z-Y" by Donald Davis, and
other Appalachian storytellers. Torrence's tale has her note about
this tale deriving from her childhood experience of hearing a school
librarian telling stories that she appeared to be reading from a book.
Elsewhere Torrence explained that she didn't know until later that she
had been read Richard Chase's folktales at school in the reader's
African American voice. It seems likely that she learned "Wicked John"
from Chase, not just from her family (see note in entry above). (This
book is also reprinted in The Complete Best-Loved Stories Told
at the National Storytelling Festival, 1995).

"Wicked
John and the Devil." Told by Jackie Torrence. Country Characters.
LP and audio cassette. Chicago, Il: Earwig Music Co., 1983 and 1986.
From an evening of storytelling live in Lexington, MA to benefit Arts
Created Together. Recorded at Cary Hall, Lexington, MA. Also includes Old
Dry Frye, Sop
Doll, "The Maco Station Light," and "The Fiddler's
Dram." Torrence is from east of Appalachia in NC but retells
many mountain tales as well as African American tales.

Crawford,
Lauren. Dye Fry and Wicked John and the Devil. Script published
by New Plays for Children, 2002. "Two short Appalachian
folk tales in one volume, 25 to 35 minutes each."

"John Smith and the Devil." Told by Alan Longmire. 2001. "The Anvilfire Story Page" in Anvilfire.com!, a web site for blacksmiths by Jock Dempsey. This tale says the blacksmith wasn't very mean but wanted people to stay away from his work. He plays the fiddle and tells stories for the stranger who turns out to be St. Peter. St. Peter is disappointed that John uses his three wishes on things that will torment anyone who touches his rocking chair, hammer, and rosebush. His encounters with devils are also similar to older versions of the tale. When he goes to Heaven, St. Peter tells him that he's in trouble for giving John such bad wishes, so John can't come in. When he's barred from hell, he is not given a light and no one knows where he is at the end.

"Wicked
John and the Devil." Told by Rick Carson. Giggles and Ghosts. Audio cassette. Elizabethtown, KY: Alpha Recording, 1991. Carson
includes humorous modern touches such as depicting the second devil's
child as Elvis, with allusions to famous Elvis Presley lyrics.

Related Appalachian Tales:

"Old
Scratch and the Mean Woman." In Smith, Jimmy Neil, ed. Why the
Possum's Tail is Bare and Other Classic Southern Stories. New
York: Avon, 1993. Reprinted from Emma Deane Smith Trent's East
Tennessee's Lore of Yesteryear (Whitesburg, TN: self-published,
1987). A woman who is mean to her family is scared (but afraid to
admit it to anyone) when she hears a voice that tells of Old Scratch's
approach. There is a vivid description of the devil as he carries
her away, and her family never knows where she went. "When Old
Scratch gets ye, you're gone for good!" (p. 85).

"Jack and the Devil." In Hicks, Orville, and Julia Taylor Ebel. Jack Tales and Mountain Yarns, As Told By Orville Hicks. Illus. Sherry Jenkins Jensen. Boone, NC: Parkway Publishers, 2009. Afterword by Thomas McGowan. pp. 76-79. Jack meets up with the devil one day and tricks him in three arrangements they make to plant 'taters and corn and raise hogs together. Part of this tale, and the Bobtail stories below, is similar to "tops and bottoms" trickster tales in other traditions, in which the smart character gets the useful part of the vegetables they share, Jack taking the bottoms of the 'taters and the tops of the corn. After they divide 200 hogs, the devil's hogs go over to Jack's side to eat his corn and after Jack claims he twisted the tails of his pigs, the devil can't tell which are his because they all have twisted tails. "Old devil never could get the best of Jack" (79). This book contains discussion of Jack and the Hicks storytellers by Orville Hicks, Ebel, and McGowan.

"Bobtail
and the Devil." In Peck, Catherine, ed. QPB Treasury of North
American Folktales. Introduction by Charles Johnson. New York:
Quality Paperback Book Club, 1998, pp. 251-52. The devil is too "dumb
and lazy" to win two contests with Bobtail, which involve growing
potatoes and raising hogs. (Reprinted from Leonard Roberts. South
From Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales. Lexington:
U Press of KY, 1964.)

"How
Bobtail Beat the Devil." In Chase,
Richard. Grandfather Tales. Illus. Berkeley Williams,
Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948, pp. 88-98. After the tale
is told, Old Robin in Chase's frame story sings "The Devil and
the Farmer's Wife," in which a man in Ohio is glad the devil
takes his wife, but she is so mean and violent the devil's children
convince him to send her back (see below).

"The Devil and the Farmer's Wife" is a traditional humorous ballad about a nagging woman taken by the Devil, who is so abusive in hell that the little devils persuade the Devil to send her back to earth (also known as "The Farmer's Curst Wife," British Child ballad 278). According to musician Robin Greenstein, John McCutcheon said he added the final verse "Guess this proves that the women are stronger than the men / To go down to hell and come back again." Other versions refer to women being better than men or worse than men, to go to hell and back. In John McCutcheon: How Can I Keep from Singing?Audio recording. June Appal Recordings. Appalshop, c.1975. Also includes "Omie Wise," "Froggie Went a' Courtin'," and other traditional songs. With musicians Tom Bledsoe, Rich Kirby, Gary Slemp, and Jack Wright. A prose tale with some simliarities is "Death
and the Old Woman."

"Freddy and his Fiddle." In
Roberts, Leonard (collector). Old
Greasybeard: Tales From the Cumberland Gap. Illus.
Leonard Epstein. Detroit: Folklore Associates, 1969. Rpt. Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press, 1980. pp. 115-17. A poor boy gets three pennies from a rich man for three years of work, and gives them away to a series of ragged men who are in greater need than he is. The third man gives him three wishes, which appear to be poor ones: to make anyone compelled to dance who hears him play his fiddle, to shoot anything he aims at, and to make anyone unable to say no to anything he asks. These abilities enable him to get revenge on the rich man he worked for and give him good luck and riches wherever he goes. This tale is the source of Anne Shelby's "Molly Fiddler," below.

Shelby, Anne. "Molly Fiddler." The Adventures of Molly Whuppie and Other
Appalachian Folktales. Illus. Paula McArdle. Chapel Hill: Univ. of NC Press,
2007. pp. 24-29. Shelby's based this tale on "Freddy and his Fiddle" from Leonard Roberts' book (above). Molly works three years for a stingy rich man, then gives away her salary of three pennies to women in need. The third woman explains that she is testing Molly, and gives her three wishes. She gets a new pair of shoes, a slingshot that will hit anything, and a fiddle that will make anyone dance without stopping. Molly wins a bet with some boys who think they can hit more with their slingshots, but she gives them some of the money back. Then her enemy Mr. Giant lies about Molly stealing money from him and tries to get her jailed but she plays the fiddle and everyone in town dances. One of the humorous details in this tale is the command for Molly to sing a ballad while the magic helper is granting her wishes: "When she got to the end of the song and all the people in it were dead, Molly opened her eyes" (p. 27).

Soldier Jack wins a contest with devils and gets involved with
predicting death and even trapping Death so that no one dies for a
long time.

Compare
with:

Carleton, W. "The
Three Wishes." In Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Edited and
Selected by W. B. Yeats. [1888]. Reprinted online in The Internet Sacred Text Archive.This long literary
story contains most of the same motifs that appear in the Appalachian
tale except that the third wish does not involve a bush but prevents
anyone except the blacksmith, Billy Dawson, from taking money out of
his purse (as in Jackie Torrence's version, above). Bill makes a
series of deals with the devil that enable him to live seven more
years and obtain wealth. Bill has a wife with whom he fights violently
throughout their lives. After he dies, Satan bars the doors and tweaks
his nose. All the alcohol he drank causes his nose to burn forever and
with his tangled beard, country folk call him Will-o'-the-Wisp as he
wanders through swampy areas to cool his nose and bothers travelers.

"The
Master-Smith." In Popular Tales from the Norse, by Sir
George Webbe Dasent. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons and Edinburgh:
David Douglas, 1888. Reprinted in The Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project. Also reprinted in SurLaLuneFairyTales.com. This tale
contains the three wishes found in American and Irish tales, with the
smith wishing for people to get stuck in his pear-tree or his chair or
his purse. He then tricks the devil, who has made a bargain to fetch
him in seven years after making him the master smith. Other parts of
the tale are different, with the Lord and St. Peter in disguise
performing feats that the smith attempts to imitate in his forge, with
deadly results. At the end it is uncertain whether the smith succeeded
in sneaking into heaven, after being barred from hell, by hurling his
sledge-hammer into the door while a poor tailor is entering. (Aaron
Shepard retells the first part of this tale in "The Master
of Masters: A Tale of Norway.")

Hooks,
William H. Mean Jake and the Devils. Illus. Dirk
Zimmer. New York: Dial Press, 1981. Three stories Hooks heard while
growing up in tidewater North Carolina are told to a boy by GranAnna
(based on his storytelling grandmother and aunt). With finely detailed
black and white illustrations, both humorous and eerie, by a German
artist. Hooks comments that Southern devils had human characteristics
and could be appealing and amusing, but they are still devilish.

"The
Meanest Man in the World" tells of Jack the tinker who was
mean to men and women when they came to get things repaired. The
plot is the same as "Wicked Jack," with Jake wandering
the Great Dismal Swamp at the end, with his ball of fire from Big
Daddy Devil, which people call fox fire.

In
"Jake-o-My-Lantern," Daddy Devil is out for his pre-Halloween
mischief, and Devil Junior, then Baby Deviline follow him, letting
the fire go out in hell. The Devil thinks he's finished until Baby
thinks of getting some of the fireball back from Mean Jake. Devils
can't take back gifts, but he makes a deal with Jack to get half
the fireball in return for a night out of the swamp. Jake tricks
the Devil into giving him Halloween off every year, by getting him
to go up a tree for food, and carving a cross in the tree, which
stops the Devil. While the Devil waits for sunup when he can get
down, the fireball glows in a pumpkin on the ground. GranAnna makes
a Jake-o-my-lantern with a cross for a nose to keep Jake away.

In "Jake and the
Fiddle," GranAnna fears for the boy who wants to play, telling
a tale about the days when only devils had fiddles. Pretending to
be the Duval family, the three devils sneak into a dance and play
so wildly that the young dancers can't stop and the old folks are
under a spell and unable to help. Baby Deviline starts to lead the
dancers to hell but Mean Jake makes his annual Halloween appearance
and takes her fiddle. Jake insists he is going to learn to play,
so the Devil makes his angry child a new fiddle. Jake wins a contest
of wills by playing so badly that the Devil finally tells him the
magic words enabling him to play like a devil. A girl who hears
him disappears into the swamp, and Jake delights in whispering magic
words into young men's ears to make them play like devils.

Carey, Valerie Scho. The
Devil and Mother Crump. Illus. Arnold Lobel. New York: HarperTrophy,
1987. Mother Crump is a stingy baker very much like Wicked Jack. Lucifer
appears in red velvet and then in disguise as a gentleman in green,
and grants her three wishes to avoid her wrath. The wishes allow her
to play tricks on Death, two little devils, and then Lucifer. When
she dies, she is rejected in Heaven and Hell but gets into Heaven
with a coal from the devil. Her baking fire and rattling of pots in
the sky are called heat lightning and thunder. (Also published as
reader's theater in Stories on Stage, ed. Aaron Shepard. H. W. Wilson Co., 1993.)

There
are many African-American variants of this tale in oral traditions
and collections such as "Jacky
My Lantern" and the other Uncle Remus tale mentioned by Chase
(see above), and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935). "How Jack O'Lanterns Came to Be" is Hurston's tale
in which Sixteen (a big man named after his shoe size) is sent away
from heaven and hell because he's too powerful. He's not a wicked
man like Wicked Jack or John but he can lift mules and capture the
devil when his master asks him to. Chase notes in American Folk
Tales and Songs that he first knew the Devil's line "and
start you a Hell of your own!" from Mules and Men.

"Jack-O-My-Lantern." In Botkin, B. A., ed. A Treasury
of Southern Folklore: Stories, Ballads, Traditions, and Folkways of the People
of the South. New York: Crown, 1944. pp. 722-24. Reprinted from Folk-Lore from Maryland (Whitney and Bullock, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, 1925). Jack is a wicked man who treats his family badly, not a blacksmith. Much of the story about Jack tricking the devil has to do with drinking. In a section of Devil Tales after Hurston's "Big Sixteen and the Devil" (see above).

"Stagolee." In
Julius Lester. Black Folktales. Illus. Tom Feelings. New
York: Grove Press, 1969. Reprinted with a new introduction by Lester,
1991. pp. 75-90. Based on a folk song that Lester had recorded, also
made famous by other singers. Stagolee is like a tall tale hero when
he beats all kinds of tough opponents, escapes death, and challenges
God, Death and the Devil. He chooses to stay in Hell where the
energetic black people are having more fun than he sees in Heaven. He
is a lawless, hard-drinking womanizer from a Georgia plantation. Like
some versions of John Henry's character (unlike Wicked Jack), Stagolee is both
criminal and well-loved. Lester includes ironic and humorous allusions
to modern popular culture.

Newhall, Brent P. "Jack
o' Lantern." In the Folktales section of Encyclopedia
Mythica. Jack is a lazy farmer who tricks the devil to stay out of
hell (gets him up a tree where he needs Jack's help) but ends up being
excluded from heaven and hell, so he fashions a lantern from a gourd
or turnip wanders the world. This summary is listed as a popular
European tale but no details on sources are given.